Mind the skills gap: the role of Internet know-how and gender in differentiated contributions to Wikipedia

Abstract

Despite the egalitarian rhetoric surrounding online cultural production, profound gender inequalities remain in who contributes to one of the most visited Web sites worldwide, Wikipedia. In analyzing this persistent disparity, previous research has focused on aspects of current contributors and the existing Wikipedia community. We draw on unique panel survey data of young adults with information about both Wikipedia contributors and non-contributors. We examine the role of people's background attributes and Internet skills in participation on the site. We find that the gender gap in editing is exacerbated by a similarly significant Internet skills gap. Our results show that the most likely contributors are high-skilled males and that among low-skilled Internet users no gender gap in Wikipedia contributions exists. Our findings suggest that efforts to understand the gender gap must also take Internet skills into account.

Keywords:

• digital inequality
• gender
• Internet skills
• participation
• peer production
• Wikipedia

Acknowledgements

The authors greatly appreciate the generous support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Robert and Kaye Hiatt Fund that made this project possible. The authors thank Benjamin Mako Hill and members of the audience at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University for their helpful input as well as the undergraduate and graduate research assistants in the Web Use Project group during the 2009–2012 academic years for their assistance with data collection and data entry. The authors are grateful for support from the Northwestern University Communication Studies Department as well as Nokia Research Center.

Notes on contributors

Eszter Hargittai is Delaney Family Professor in the Communication Studies Department and Faculty Associate of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University where she heads the Web Use Project. Her research looks at how people may benefit from their digital media uses with a particular focus on how differences in people's Web-use skills influence what they do online. [email: [email protected]]

Aaron Shaw is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He studies collective action, collaboration, and mobilization in online communities and peer production projects. [email: [email protected]]

Notes

1 For reasons discussed in detail below, we do not test for the presence of a conditional causal process, such as mediation or moderation.

2 After two attempts at reaching respondents in postal mail, we sent an email to those who had not yet responded to request a verified postal address for mailing the survey in hard copy. No one filled out the survey online.

3 This approach follows the procedures recommended by Berry et al. (in press) for circumstances when theoretical support for interaction terms is ambiguous. They demonstrate that normal statistical tests for multiplicative interactions do not possess sufficient statistical power to detect the alternative hypotheses (or reject the null) with conventional levels of precision.

4 All results reported here are robust to the exclusion of the subset of respondents who had been assigned to edit Wikipedia for a class. In additional robustness checks, we included a control for whether or not respondents had ever contributed to Wikipedia by 2009, and our findings were unchanged substantively.

5 This is due to the fact that, in the interaction models, the coefficient for gender only captures the relationship with the dependent variable when the other component of the interaction term (Internet skills) is equal to zero.

6 The figure is substantively the same if we use the coefficients from Model 4.

7 Again, the figure is unchanged if we use Model 4.